When honesty is the best policy

Who would choose a career in which success involves being loathed by at least half the population, in which every day is lived under the scrutiny of people who, if they cannot detect your mistakes, will claim you made them anyway, and either way will vilify you for it? A career that is bound to end in failure unless (as with poets) death comes at a point both early and high?

Such is politics: and at election time it is a renewed puzzle why there are so many wannabes trying to get into the shark tank, and so many scarred veterans still not scrambling to get out. There are only three plausible explanations.

One is the desire for power and influence. But this is pie in the sky. There are places in the world where politics might give power to some of those who choose it, but there is no power and precious little influence for a workaday British MP, and even for the few topmost ministerial office-holders it is severely constrained. If this is the motive, it is nowhere near worth the cost.

A second is the desire to be at the centre of things, close to the excitement, living in the vibe and pressure of the minute-by-minute news cycle, feeling the adrenalin. Well: anyone who has sat through the committee stage of a bill will know that closeness to the centre of things does not always pump the adrenaline—more likely those parasympathetic nervous system neurotransmitters which put one to sleep. Still, there are moments of excitement: scandals, resignations, controversies and elections, so adrenaline-junkies do get their fix. If the cost described above is worth paying for it, good luck.

A third—and probably the one that applies to most of the more intelligent folk among politicians—is the sincere pre-career desire to make a difference for the better. This noble aim doubtless starts accumulating dents as early as Day Two, and has probably collapsed in a heap by Day Four, because politics is (as the best analogy-turned-cliché has it) exactly like herding cats, and is accordingly a labyrinth of unpleasant necessities: compromises, failures, dead ends, baulks, blockages, frustrations, a welter of half-truths and untruths, spins and prevarications, all packaged in the maddening realisation that the opposition and the press are determined to trip you up at every turn as you try to achieve the impossible.

Given all this, elections are an intriguing time. They force the headline politicians of all parties into an even more powerful X-ray machine than they normally endure. Is an election therefore more likely to make politicians cover things up and deceive, or will it reveal what they really intend? The answer is both.

Consider Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s Prime Minister, in their recent election. He sought to scare his core constituency into backing him by claiming that Arab Israelis were planning to vote “in droves”; it was a ploy. To the same constituency he vowed that there would be no Palestinian state, showing—by thus revealing his true intention—that he had been stringing everyone along in the “peace process.” Deceit and revelation here went hand in hand.

Consider Muhammadu Buhari, Nigeria’s new President, once an advocate of Sharia law, now avowing a belief in religious tolerance; once a military dictator who overthrew an elected government, now avowing a belief in democracy. Was he deceiving because it was election time, or was this a sincere change of heart? In his first speech as President he stated a determination to defeat Boko Haram and to root out corruption: that promises the latter. The concession by Buhari’s predecessor, Goodluck Jonathan, at the end of polling day was a sign that Nigerian democracy is deepening, and does Jonathan himself credit. This is an instance of an election revealing something good.

The Conservative Party hopes that increased public exposure of Ed Miliband will reveal his deficits as an aspirant to Number 10. Labour hopes to prove itself reassuring to business. The Liberal Democrats hope to survive. Other parties, adopting a franker approach, intend to exploit the less appetising impulses of nationalism and tribalism in various parts of the United Kingdom to give them inflated influence in parliament over larger parties in need of coalition or “confidence and supply” arrangements.

In this election therefore it is the larger parties who have more to gain by covering things up, the smaller parties more to gain by honesty. As with Netanyahu and Buhari, time will tell which strategy works best.